


the butterfly effect

by lumailia



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: CUE MAXIMUM SAD, F/F, First Kiss, First Time, Frederick is Severa's father, Mild Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Robin is Lucina's mother, ending is happy tho, my usual symbolic bullshit, this is just poetic lesbian angst, unspoken i love yous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 18:22:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21342664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumailia/pseuds/lumailia
Summary: “The present determines the future. The present is an approximation.”The princess and her knight, in fragments.
Relationships: Lucina/Serena | Severa
Comments: 3
Kudos: 65





	the butterfly effect

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! No one asked for this poetic gay bs but here it is, anyway. It’s non-chronological, btw, so every little fragment takes place at a different time. Hope you like it!

**the butterfly effect**

There is a butterfly on the princess’s chest, its wings unfurled, caressing her. Loving her. No. These are fingers. Deft and pale, roughed by a life of swordplay and punches and digging in the dirt, wondering if the center of the earth would be kinder than the surface. They were such odd children. Grieving children. Her mother died for the princess’s father. He died for nothing. The princess almost cries, but there are the hands, and something hot against her mouth. Another mouth, she’s sure. It loves her as much as the hands do, but with a different heat. _Gods, _they were barely ever children. But they tried to be. Laughter moves the princess, and the hands move too, down to her ribs, the sharp peaks of her hipbones. Warmth coils low in her stomach, tightening her thighs. A finger slips beneath the princess’s pants and runs along her waistband. She is breathing too fast. She is thinking about the butterflies.

“Is that good?” her knight asks. The mouth is on the princess’s ear. It bites, and the princess groans.

“I could die tomorrow.”

The princess’s neck, now. A flick of tongue, and her knight’s teeth sink deep, bruising _don’t forget me. I’m afraid. _“I’m not thinking about that.”

“Yes, you are.”

Two hands press their way up her sides, kneading softly at her chest before rubbing into her shoulders, taking her jaw into the wells of their palms. She turns her face up and runs a thumb across her cheek—she feels a blister. It is a moment before the princess opens her eyes. She is afraid to look at her knight, of what she’ll see in her gaze. Lips touch where her lashes meet her skin. Once, twice—

The princess opens her eyes. In the dim, her knight’s are the color of fading sparks, a reminder of time running thin. She is not afraid anymore. She is in awe of her. She leans up and kisses the darkness that pools beneath her collarbones, drags her nose up the soft, slender column of her neck.

“Kiss me again,” she whispers.

Her knight obliges.

+

The masked boy has a gift for the princess. She summons him to her quarters after supper, and he appears swiftly at once, ever dutiful, ever reverent. He takes after his mother—she had been a servant, once, before she was a warrior. Before her wyvern went down near the river, and the infantry found her body, a pincushion of arrows, half-crushed beneath it.

He enters with his hands behind his back. A black-blue cape flows over his shoulders, catching long streams of candlelight as he paces across the room.

“Your Highness,” he says.

The princess, perched at the foot of her bed, motions for him to sit beside her. He nods, approaches. This is an order.

“You said you had something for me?” asks the princess.

“I do,” he says. “For your journey.”

He sits down, and the princess strains to not peek beneath his cape. “Carry on.”

“You plan to conceal your identity, yes?”

“Until the time is right.”

He pulls a piece of molded metal from behind his back and places it in her hands. The mask is the color of her tunic—a deep, flinty blue—accented in steady strokes of gold. She pads a finger around the edge. The shape mirrors a butterfly’s: broad wings to fan across her eyes, small ones to curl along her cheeks. 

“This is beautiful,” she murmurs. “You made this?”

“I simply spruced up an old model, but I thought it suited you.”

“It’s perfect.” She slides her fingers under it, studying the heft. “Can I--?”

“Please.”

Slowly, she lifts the mask to her face, securing the hooks behind her ears. Cold drills through her skin where the metal touches, yet she savors the sting of it, her eyes closed in a moment of quiet veneration. When she opens them, she sees the masked boy grinning between the slits.

“How do I look?” she asks.

“Like a Hero-King.” 

“Really?”

“Well, perhaps with longer hair…”

She permits herself to laugh. “I think my knight will find a way to fix that.”

“You’re going to keep it on?”

“For now, I will,” she says. “I must grow used to it being a part of me.”

The masked boy nods, understanding. He had said he loved her, when they were children. He used to chase her around the palace grounds, wildflowers bunched in his fists, professing feelings he knew nothing about, beyond what he saw in his parents. The princess smiles halfway. His parents are gone, now—but a silver-haired boy is teaching him to dance. 

+

“I just feel like he’s out there looking for her. He never believed what happened.”

The knight glances at the princess. She knows this because she sees her in the corner of her eye, because something about her breaks through the premonition she’s weaving from the shadows in the curtains, because this knight is every bit her father’s child.

“Would you like my honesty, or my silence?”

“Have you run out of lies?”

“I don’t think you deserve that.”

“Tell me, then.”

“I think your brother is dead.”

The princess looks down, grief heavying her shoulders. She has only considered her brother’s more than probable death every night before falling asleep, and every morning upon waking.

There are black whorls in the wooden floorboards, and they look like faces.

“You think so too?” her knight prods.

“He crawled into bed with me that night,” the princess says. She clasps her hands and lays them on her knees. “He hadn’t done that in years. He said it was the storm, but it wasn’t storming that night. The sky was clear. I told him it had to have been a dream, and he just said he missed mother. Then I fell asleep with his arms around me and I never saw him again.”

Her knight shifts closer. The mattress squeaks.

“Sometimes, I wish I’d had a little brother or sister.”

The princess stiffens. “Perhaps be glad you didn’t.”

“I always hated how much your parents loved each other,” the knight confesses. There are no barriers, tonight. “They were my king and queen and yet I couldn’t stand to look at them—or the way they looked at you. My mother didn’t even love me. And my father, he tried, but I know he never did.

My parents loved your father, though. More than each other, more than themselves. And they hated your mother. They tried to hide it, but I know they hated her.” She balls her skirt up in her hands, pinching her palms through the fabric. “I don’t know how I am supposed to feel about you.”

Guilt fills the princess, and she swallows it like a sour tonic. “You are in my employ. I’d hope you’d feel at least a little loyalty.”

“Oh, I do. Perhaps too much.”

“Then I hope you feel warmly towards me,” the princess endeavors. “I have always seen you as my friend.”

_Friend. _The word lingers in the air, and the princess wonders if her knight would grab it and rip it apart.

“Tell me what you think of me,” she says instead. “Tell me all of it. Even the bad stuff.” 

“Even the bad stuff?”

“I’m your knight. I can’t punch you anymore.”

The princess laughs, a quiet thing, recalling one of their dirtier spars, which left her walking around the palace with her knight’s—her _friend_’s—knuckle prints on her cheek.

“You terrify me,” the princess remarks. “Your tongue is vicious, vicious as a sword. You say every bitter truth that crosses your mind, yet you lie just as easily. You are vain. And cruel. Yet you have held fast to me through every tragedy that has struck our lives. I have lain my head on your shoulder after losing my mother, my father—I have grasped your hand as you lost your own. To put it simply, you have carried me. And when this war makes me feel like a monster, whenever I want to feel human, I look at you.”

A long quiet follows, and the princess holds in her breath.

“Careful, Your Highness,” her knight says, finally. “You sound like you’re confessing.”

“Who’s to say I’m not?”

The knight whips her head towards the princess. She cannot read her. Can barely feel the bed beneath her legs. Everything is close, and tight—her chest is full of feathers, some dark, winged beast clawing its way up her throat. She has made a terrible mistake. She can never come back from this.

“Take it back,” her knight hisses. “You’ll damn us.”

The talons are in her mouth now, prying her lips apart. “We aren’t them.”

A tear falls down her knight’s cheek, crystalizes on a spot above her lip. The air between them simmers. “We could be, if we do this.”

The princess is the beast now, carnal and impulsive, yet she kisses her knight’s face with an aching softness, her lips stealing that one diamond tear. “No,” the princess whispers. “We shall make our own future. Carve it with our own blades.”

The knight finds the princess’s hand and curls them together in her lap, tethering them. Little distance waits between them now—the princess can nearly feel her knight’s heartbeat, a frantic adagio to fill the silence of an empty world.

“If you kiss me, my liege, I fear I may return the favor,” she says. 

“You sound like your father,” says the princess. “I want to hear you.”

Her knight does not kiss gently, but the princess did not expect so much. These are not easy feelings. Love in war is a terrible thing, a more audacious hope than any spell or sword against the dark. It is the very thing that killed all their parents. Yet the princess lets it burn in her—the beast becomes a phoenix. She pulls her knight full into her arms and deepens the kiss, sliding her tongue along her teeth, grinning when she shivers. Death beckons at the windows, behind the curtains, yet the princess has never felt so viscerally, defiantly alive.

They part for one glorious second of air before the knight kisses her again, teeth digging hard into her lip. “How dare you?” she rasps. The princess tastes iron and salt. “How dare you exist? How dare you live when they, when _everyone, _just dies?”

“Because I must keep fighting,” she says. She wipes the blood from her lip, and her knight steals her hand, locking it selfishly at her own waist. “Because I must protect my people.”

“If you die, it will ruin me.”

“Then I will live. I promise it.”

“Gods, I’ve never hated you so much.”

They come together once more, lips aching red, hands knotted in blouses, legs an impossible tangle. Her knight prods at her belt, and the princess whispers her consent. It earns her a blissful shudder, followed by the slow dragging of her knight’s core along her thigh. They sigh together—this is a new sensation, this thrumming between her legs, but the princess wants more of it.

Fingertips slip beneath the princess’s belt, playing scales across her bruises and scars. “Are you sure?” her knight asks.

“Yes, if you’ll have me.”

Her knight kisses her neck, then slowly pulls the princess’s shirt above her head before placing it in her hands. The knight puts her own on her hips.

“You’re really sure?”

“I am.”

The princess kisses her, a soft, yearning caress before they surrender to the burning inside of them. Then she leaves her blouse on the floor, and her past in tatters.

+

The sun shines, and the butterfly beats its wings. Small though the motion is, it stirs the air. Something changes. On the other side of the world, a cold wind kisses the burning earth. Storms bloom where they meet, flashing, moaning, writhing across the sky, emptying themselves onto the earth below. The present determines the future. The present is an approximation.

The princess meets her knight in her bedroom. She is standing at the vanity, a brush in one hand and the other on her hip, impatient. She wears her armor—shades of brown, like the roots of her hair, and the coffee her mother made when they were children. Her face is hiding something.

“Are you ready?”

A nod—a lie. The princess sits down on the brocade stool and avoids meeting her reflection. She runs a nail along the crevasses of a glass perfume jar, cutting hairline curves through the dust that clings there. She has never worn this perfume. It was her mother’s, given by her father as a wedding gift. He loved her foolishly—perhaps that is what really killed him, in the end.

“I practiced on your friend with the Pegasus,” her knight says. Her voice brings her home.

“I trust you.”

Her knight pulls her brush through her hair. The princess’s cheeks are damp, but she does not scrub the tears away. They dry where they fall, tightening her skin with salt.

For a moment, the brushing stops. Her knight parts her hair into thick pieces, laying them over her shoulders. Then, she feels her fingers, their gentle, swirling strokes along her neck. They follow the pattern of the violet eyes that stare out of her skin, the deep, wing-bone lines sprawled between them.

“This mark on the back of your neck,” her knight murmurs. “What does it mean?”

“It’s just a birthmark. Brother and I got them from our mother.”

“Your hair will still cover it.”

The princess bows her head. “Thank you.”

Her knight begins to braid the pieces together, and the princess closes her eyes, dreams of a world where she has her knight and her family, where there is no more war, where she can be eighteen years old a little while longer. Should her mission go well, it is the world she will return to. But time is a fragile thing. One wrong move, one misplaced flutter, and the storm will take them all.

“Can you do something for me, in the past?” her knight asks her.

The princess looks up. She sees her new reflection, the boyish bob of her hair, and the girl she loves behind her. She focuses on the bow at her neck. “What is that?”

“Will you tell me if my mother loved my father? Even once?”

A smile curves her mouth, hopeful as the gleam of her sword. “I will. I promise.”


End file.
